Liquid perception in Chinese ink-wash animation: Duan Xiaoxuan’s cinematography in The Herd Boy’s Flute (1963)

This article recuperates the cinematographer and camerawoman Duan Xiaoxuan (1934–), the head of the Technology Department at the Shanghai Animation Film Studio (SAFS) and a dominant force behind socialist-era animation cinematography from the 1950s to the 1980s. Positioned within recent feminist and historiographic recoveries of women’s labour in PRC animation, the study reframes Duan as a hidden luminary whose technical mastery of SAFS’s hybridised multiplane camera enabled some of the Studio’s most celebrated ink-wash films. Focusing primarily on The Herd Boy’s Flute (Citation1963), I approach Duan’s craft through the material-philosophical properties of water and ink, and the cinematographic operations that render these qualities perceptible. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s film-philosophies of the perception-image from his Cinema books, the essay argues that Duan’s camerawork reframes filmic subjectivity through aquatic movements. In this context, this essay argues that Duan’s framing of painted and animated images thinks through the apparatus, revealing inky-eyed visions of not only transcultural aesthetic legacies, but also of the liquid lifeworlds and vitalistic perceptions of everyday rural life in socialist China.